Civil rights

In The New York Times, Adam Liptaklooks at the Supreme Court’s decision to deny petitions in all seven cases challenging bans on same-sex marriage.

The New York Timesalso previews the new Supreme Court term and argues that the new session could define the legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts. The article quotes William P. Marshall from the ACS Supreme Court Preview.

In The McClatchy-Tribune, Michael Doyle provides an overview of the Supreme Court’s term that begins today. ACS President Caroline Fredrickson offers her perspective in the article.

In The Atlantic, Garrett Epps discusses Heien v. North Carolina and whether the justices will support a “Barney Fife Loophole” to the Fourth Amendment.

by Atiba R. Ellis, Associate Professor of Law, West Virginia University College of Law, @atibaellis. This post is part of our 2014 Constitution Day symposium.

On September 17, 1787, the framers signed the U.S. Constitution. The document they approved 227 years ago is a work of genius as it provided a democratic republic that has endured economic turmoil, mass insurrection, and disasters of various sorts -- forces that have toppled other democracies. The U.S. Constitution, the oldest enduring written constitution in the world today, has endured and preserved democracy based upon rule of law.

Although one might point to the advantages and disadvantages of federalism, the dynamics of enumerated powers, or the political compromises that undergird separation of powers as powerful tactics the Constitution deploys, it is not in any of these mechanisms where the genius of the Constitution lies. Its true genius is its mechanism to allow we the people to reinvent our democracy as our times and ethics demand. It is this power of reinvention that has allowed our constitution to endure and matter to the world.

This power of democratic transition is best illustrated in the way our Constitution has been reinvented, over time, from a document that enshrined inequality to one that strives for equality. The Constitution of 1787 reflected and implemented a social theory we would not recognize or sanction today. The Constitution endorsed states’ rights (though this name would not be invented until a century later to protect slavery) and left it to the states to structure the social relations of the nation. Thus, despite a Bill of Rights that protected the rights of citizens, the Constitution allowed the chattel slavery of Africans to endure in the United States when it was being abolished in other parts of the world. The Constitution allowed women to be treated as property. Despite our hymns to constitutional genius, the lived experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was rooted in inequality.

To focus merely on the genius of the original document (and as a consequence, elevate those times and those founders) is to fixate on an originalism that suffered subordination and endorsed a hierarchy. And, as our experience with the Civil War illustrates, the country came within a hair’s breath of being dismantled by faction and racism due to an unwillingness to recreate the United States.

Yet our Constitution endures because it has embedded within it mechanisms by which our evolving notions of equality and justice may receive constitutional protection from the tyranny of caste and status. Though volumes have been written on this topic, it is worth remembering in our celebration of the Constitution that the amendment process and the wisdom of legislators and judges who sought to make manifest the idea of equality helped to preserve the Union at its most imperiled points. One needs only recount the work of Reconstruction, the long march from segregation to Civil Rights, the movement towards women’s equality, and our modern day same-sex marriage cases to see how the long arc of equality has progressed. And all of these changes have been enabled through an American constitutionalism that, in the words of Harper v. Virginia, is not shackled to the political theory of a particular era.

Ian Millhiser in ThinkProgress and Todd C. Frankel in The Washington Post explain how the Affordable Care Act has impacted major and minor health decisions in everyday life, and the potential cost of Halbig to these changes.

Michael McGough writes for the Los Angeles Times on the details of last week’s decision from U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman on the constitutionality of Louisiana’s ban on same-sex marriage.

A new plan to reduce court fees in Ferguson, Mo. could help ease tensions in the city, reports Joseph Shapiro of National Public Radio.

Erin Fuchs explains for Business Insider why the Supreme Court is examining the issue of prison beards and what it could mean for First Amendment interpretation.